I am neither concerned about RAM usage (as I've got enough) nor about losing data in case of an accidental shut-down (as my power is backed, the system is reliable and the data are not critical). But ...

On occasion I've seen comments online along the lines of "make sure you set 'bs=' because the default value will take too long," and my own extremely-unscientific experiences of, "well that seemed to ...

A lot of command-line utilities can take their input either from a pipe or as a filename argument. For long shell scripts, I find starting the chain off with a cat makes it more readable, especially ...

I have the experience that Linux works fine until the physical memory is exhausted. As soon as swap space is used the performance is severely degraded and the GUI becomes unresponsive.
This problem ...

Are there any specific recommendations on speeding up X applications over ssh on a slow network connection? In this specific case, I am accessing a server located in west coast from a laptop in east ...

I have a dev server on which sshd sometimes stops working because the machine runs out of RAM. Yes we are running low on memory and upgrading is not a feasible choice right now. What I want to do is ...

I have been using Gnome and KDE for a while, and I am now running Compiz standalone... Regarding system resource, I think the most heavy ones are feature-rich desktop environments (Gnome, KDE), then ...

Or is shutdown -h now the fastest it can get?
I look for some syscall or similar that will allow to skip lots of the stuff done prior to shutdown (in particular to care about the running proccesses).
...

I never quite understood why high disk I/O slowed the system so much. It's strange to me because I would expect the slow-down to affect only those processes dependent on the hard/optical drive data, ...

Why is the wc utility so slow?
When I run it on a large file, it takes about 20 times longer than md5sum:
MyDesktop:/tmp$ dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k count=1024 of=/tmp/bigfile
1024+0 records in
1024+0 ...

If this question is too programmer oriented, let me know. I wonder if there are people familiar with the O_DIRECT flag for the open() system call on Linux 2.6? Linus disparages its use, however high ...

Occasionally, something on my system starts hammering the disk. I would like to log data that would let me know about I/O usage per process, then I could go back to it later and see what keeps doing ...

There used to be a kernel config option called sched_user or similar under cgroups. This allowed (to my knowledge) all users to fairly share system resources. In 2.6.35 it is not available. Is there a ...

By now the Useless Use of cat Award is very well known, and there's also a mention of a Useless Use of echo (not relevant for this question). I'm wondering if there should be a "Useless Use of echo in ...

I am considering using btrfs on my data drive so that I can use snapper, or something like snapper, to take time based snapshots. I believe this will let me browse old versions of my data. This would ...

I am timeing some of my commands. Now to average the measures, I'd like to run and time my commands a specified number of times, and get the results with a calculated mean and standard deviation. The ...

Is there a method of slowing down the copy process on Linux?
I have a big file, say 10GB, and I'd like to copy it to another directory, but I don't want to copy it with full speed. Let's say I'd like ...